Heya,
I’ve been trying to convert grease pencil geometry nodes things to mesh but it just doesn’t let me do it. Is there a particular node I’m missing? The geometry is right there, this shouldn’t be impossible, right?
What’s your node setup? I did a bit of googling and it seems your need the “realize instances” or “make instances real” node at the end before output geometry to apply the modifier with the expected results.
That’s certainly what it looks like yes, but unfortunately not the problem. I also put a Grease Pencil to Curves at the start, which didn’t work either. I did however found a way to do it myself, which would be exporting as OBJ/FBX/STL and reimporting, but don’t understand why we can’t just do it in Blender. If I try to apply the modifier, it gives me this error
Because of GP layers are considered as instances, output of a GN modifier converting them into meshes is also instances, without a Realize Instances node. It is necessary to apply modifier.
But applying a modifier does not change object type. So, such modifier can only be applied on Meshes, if GP object is indicated by an Object Info node.
You can not apply a GN modifier converting GP to Mesh on a GP object.
You can apply a GN modifier converting Mesh to Curves and Curves to GP on a GP object.
So, if desired output of modifier is a mesh ; object handling modifier should be a mesh. If desired output is GP ; object should be GP. If desired output is a Curve ; object type should be Curve…
But geometry used as input can be from any type.
Yes, I understand that. That image I sent probably conveyed the wrong message. You can convert a curve to mesh by applying Visual Geometry to Mesh, which I tried in the first video I shared. If the grease pencil curve/drawing is considered an instance, why wouldn’t it be allowed to be transformed to mesh if you Apply Instances in geometry nodes? Especially because you can export it to mesh. Just seems like an overlooked mechanic by the devs.
But again, the workaround method is relatively easy so not a huge problem